In writing Stuffed and Starved I was lucky enough to interview farmers and movement activists across the world. This meant travelling, and this means CO2 emissions. A generous totting up of the distances travelled puts the figure involved in writing Stuffed and Starved at around 60,000 miles which, using the carbon calculator here means that I put 24 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
I’ve been trying to find out a little about how best to offset it. First, here’s a range of carbon calculators. Then you need to figure out how to offset. My good friend Anirvan Chatterjee shopped around and found out that there’s a considerable price range in the offset market:
And price, predictably, isn’t the best guide to the surest way of making sure that your offsets are actually offsetting. There’s only a little correlation between price and this independent assessment of performance, which finds these top performers…
- AgCert/Drive Green (Ireland)
- AtmosFair (Germany)
- Carbon Neutral Company (UK)
- Climate Care (UK)
- Climate Trust (US)
- CO2 Balance (UK)
- Native Energy (US)
- Sustainable Travel/My Climate (US)
Still, it means that when the royalty money comes in, I’ll be sending off a cheque to Native Energy. And in the meantime, reading the report to understand quite why.